Which Fish: With fish stocks under pressure, which are okay to eat?

by Zarkonnen • 15 years ago

161 93 15 years ago

SeafoodWatch already has a pretty solid iPhone and Android app that does this[1], but I'm all for more options and having raw JSON available.

[1] http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_i...

Alex3917• 15 years ago

You can also get the same information online here:

http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=1540 (eco best / worst)

http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17694 (health best / worst)

You can even get a pocket guide that goes into your wallet that you can take out whenever you go into a sushi restaurant or fish market. Here in NYC there are a lot of hedge fund managers with serious neurological problems from eating sushi every day for years. They manage billions of dollars in assets but their hands twitch like they have parkinsons.

rwolf2• 15 years ago

Thanks a lot for posting the pocket guide. I like pretending to know what I'm doing when I eat sushi, and that guide will help to artificially limit my options so it looks less like I'm choosing at random (and eating healthier to boot!).

reedlaw• 15 years ago

"Which are okay to eat?" implies how much mercury is present, but it seems this question is from an environmental perspective.

jeremymims2• 15 years ago

The environmental perspective is the most important. The truth is the oceans are dying and overfishing has created colossal dead zones.

The best option that should be on this list is to not eat any fish at all.

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

Preserving fish species is more important than not poisoning yourself?

elmomalmo2• 15 years ago

Dead zones are not created by overfishing but by intensive farming techniques on land and what's subsequently washed into the sea via rivers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)

Duff• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, international legal frameworks with respect to the oceans are not keeping pace with technology.

Anything that reduces consumer demand is a good thing, but American demand in the big picture is a small piece of pie. The Japanese will not be satisfied until every last aquatic creature is extracted from the Mediterranean.

America's biggest contribution to eradicating sea life are the destructive land use policies in the Mississippi watershed. We provide ridiculous incentives via direct payment to grow corn with massive quantities of fertilizer, build massive levee systems to reclaim floodplain land and cut canals in the Mississippi delta.

All of these things together have turned the Gulf of Mexico into an aquatic wasteland.

davidhollander6• 15 years ago

> The best option that should be on this list is to not eat any fish at all.

Your logic fails for the following reasons:

- not all fish are from the ocean

- not all species of fish are in fact overfished. There is no Sardine crisis.

- Fish consumption is linked to increased IQ including in babies and children

- Piscetarians have lower rates of heart disease than both vegans and occasional meat eaters

- Promoting abstinence over harm reduction is generally a very silly and inefficient way to do things

sliverstorm3• 15 years ago

Even if the entire United States ceased eating fish, the problem would continue and get worse. Other countries would step in and eat the fish we would have been eating.

In other words, the way to solve the problem is not by not eating fish (though that is perfectly fine at an individual level) but to establish sustainability around the globe.

sliverstorm3• 15 years ago

The Hawaii-based longline fishery for swordfish was closed in 2000 over concerns of excessive sea turtle by-catch. One consequence of the closure was that 70 Hawaii-based vessels were replaced by 1,500-1,700 longline vessels from various Asian nations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longline_fishing

The problem does not simply go away because Americans stop eating fish.

elmomalmo2• 15 years ago

I disagree, I very much read that as 'which are [environmentally] ok to eat'. However, a friend's wife is pregnant. He - being somewhat preoccupied with pregnancy at the moment - may well have read it they way you did.

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

I think that would make an interesting poll... how many people read it as "Which are okay to eat - for our planet" and how many read it as "Which are okay to eat - for my health"?

sixtofour2• 15 years ago

for my health, until I scrolled to the bottom.

pbhjpbhj• 15 years ago

For the planet.

Funnily enough my little lad asked me randomly "can we have cod". I'm conscious that we should only eat tuna once a week (line caught seems hot at the moment) but don't eat much fish and hadn't thought about mercury/environmental chemicals for other catches.

lean• 15 years ago

I assumed this was about mercury levels too, I would have never guessed it was environmental.

AJ007• 15 years ago

I'm not going to run down the whole list, but some of the worst from a mercury perspective -- shark, swordfish, and most types of tuna are listed here as "not okay to eat." May be there is a correlation between larger fish with the most mercury and fish that are more endangered.

The fish in my diet consists almost entirely of salmon and trout, and occasionally a tuna tartare (I would have a real hard time giving that one up.) I avoid farmed stuff.

Zarkonnen5• 15 years ago

There is actually a correlation: large, predatory fish accumulate the most mercury because they're highest on the food chain, and they also tend to be rare and slow to breed, and hence more endangered.

With farmed fish it basically depends on where it's farmed. It can be very healthy and sustainable, or quite terrible.

jonknee• 15 years ago

"With fish stocks under pressure, which are okay to eat?" makes it really obvious...

MatthewPhillips2• 15 years ago

I eat fish 3 or 4 days a week but I almost never eat any of the fish listed as "not okay". Cod is the only exception. Price seems to regulate this list pretty well.

benstein• 15 years ago

Blue Ocean Institute makes a similarly up-to-date sustainable and healthy seafood database accessible via text message. Text FISH to 30644 to try it.

jellicle• 15 years ago

This is a silly list. Not because fish aren't important, but because there's no way to take action on this list. Studies have shown that a huge amount of fish is mislabelled. Yes, pick up a piece of xxxx from a seafood market and the odds are that it's not xxxx.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/science/earth/27fish.html

Consumers have no effective way to verify what they're eating. This is a situation where there is either government action or no action; no private personal actions can be successful, barring the creation of instant cheap at-the-restaurant-table DNA analysis.

Zarkonnen5• 15 years ago

That's a very interesting link, but saying that we might as well not bother because there's labeling issues is rather overstating the problem. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

cosgroveb• 15 years ago

Did you even read the lede?

>Scientists aiming their gene sequencers at commercial seafood are discovering rampant labeling fraud in supermarket coolers and restaurant tables: cheap fish is often substituted for expensive fillets, and overfished species are passed off as fish whose numbers are plentiful.

The link states that overfished species are being intentionally mis-labelled. I would say that, yes, we might as well not bother if the seafood industry is going to pull these kind of shenanigans, absent some sort of regulation from the government (an unpopular sentiment here).

jdietrich• 15 years ago

Most of the passing-off is good news from a sustainability perspective. The most common substitute fish are pollock and farmed tilapia, catfish and basa, all highly sustainable. Here in the UK, cod prices are so high that most fish and chip shop menus just list 'fish' where they once listed cod, the generic fish invariably being farmed basa. Most popular processed fish products like fish fingers, breaded fillets and fish pies are using pollock in place of cod or haddock.

The most sustainable fish are the cheapest. If we can move past our fetish for eating apex predators, we can easily solve fish sustainability without the need for regulation.

pasbesoin• 15 years ago

I'd say that the recent prominence of such lists, and articles, means that at least the general population is becoming somewhat aware of the issue. Without that, nothing much is likely to happen.

Perhaps it's difficult to assure you're being given what you're told, but at least people are starting to ask.

And when preservation such as fishing regulations are proposed, this will make sense to more people. Maybe all the more so when they realize that their individual decisions don't matter, aren't sufficient, because they're bing lied to.

I hope. The alternative is pretty dismal.

mturmon• 15 years ago

Here's an earlier story, with similar conclusions:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/science/22fish.html

And here's a reference to an even earlier story from 2005, in which farmed salmon are substituted for wild (not DNA-checkable):

http://vitalchoice.com/shop/pc/articlesView.asp?id=95

So, 6 years later, we still don't know what we're eating.

elehack• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, government action is also incredibly limited in what it can do. Tragedy of the commons - all it takes is a few nations that don't subscribe to whatever sustainable fishing agreement is devised, and fishers can fish unsustainably under their flag.

sehugg2• 15 years ago

The linked article seems to indicate current efforts toward cheaper DNA sampling for use by government regulators. Handheld detectors might be a decade or two away as solid-state DNA chips come of age. I think all that is required is a population that demands a properly labeled and inspected food supply -- I'm bullish about the technology getting there.

tjpick• 15 years ago

> Consumers have no effective way to verify what they're eating.

Buy whole fish. It's much harder to be lied to when you can look the fish in the eye.

JFPetersen• 15 years ago

I just want to give a plug here for a very underrated & unknown newspaper; the Saint Petersburg Times. They did tests like this about 5 years ago with similar results, and I believe they were the first investigative reporters who looked into this issue.

megablast• 15 years ago

Just as we should dismiss the police force because they are not 100% effective, they do not capture all murders and theives, and sometimes convict innocent people.

It would be a better argument if you could talk about the actual odds.

IanDrake• 15 years ago

I usually only eat what I can catch. And if I can catch it, well... that fish just won the Darwin award because I suck at fishing.

spodek• 15 years ago

You can't tell just by having caught it. If it already had a lot of children and propagated its genes it's not very eligible for winning.

forgotAgain• 15 years ago

A title of "..which are sustainable" would be clearer. The article concerns the sustainability of the fish and not the goodness of them as a food. There is for example no mention of the problems of eating catfish farm raised in China (high levels of toxins).

sixtofour2• 15 years ago

Yes, this was my impression/confusion exactly. Even seeing "under pressure" at the top, I still thought the list was fish that are safe to eat, in light of or despite pressures.

It would be good to have a second list along side, fish that are safe to eat. Or just one list, safe and sustainable.

eykanal• 15 years ago

Sooo, why is this top link on HN? Am I missing some nifty tech embedded in the site, or is everyone here just interested in fish?

kahawe5• 15 years ago

Can't eat beef because of mad cow and the heavy medication used in breeding; same goes for pigs and chicken and all other mass-produced meat. On top of that you have the question of animal cruelty and the questionable necessity of killing animals to eat them attached to it. Plus it is generally not that healthy to eat it all the time and you shouldn't eat meat more than once or twice a week or so.

Can't eat fish for all the mercury and lots of them being close to extinction and it kills dolphins and damages the oceans.

Can't eat eggs or milk, again for cruelty and various possible diseases or other contamination.

And vegetables and fruits? Well, practically all of the mass produced ones never EVER saw any soil or real sunlight but artificial gel to grow on and were picked by poor and heavily underpaid and downright exploited people from (and typically in) poor countries under inhuman conditions and bought by the rich nations for next to nothing. (here is to you, militant vegetarians!) On top of that they are heavily laden with chemicals of all sorts and chances are when you get to buy them, they are far from being fresh.

Plus for practically all the food mentioned above: production heavily, grossly outranks what actually ends up being bought... so we just dump it, burn it or do FSM-knows what with it. We certainly do NOT give it to the starving people in this world because it would cost too much.

And if you go organic and local farmers only? Apart from few choices, you have even less inspections and regulations to protect your safety because you don't know what they are selling, what it grew on and how clean and safe to eat it is. And some of it just taste absolutely horrible.

This is just pathetic... the whole food industry, front to back, top to bottom. If you go by the warnings on what to avoid, what is dangerous for your health and what is immoral and wrong to eat, we better come up with a way to get by on nothing but sunlight and water quickly.

But then again, fresh water supplies are currently being bought up by Big-Food to make lots and lots of money and water in bottles is very often not as clean as one might hope and certain chemicals from plastic bottles could basically work like estrogen in your body.

DanielStraight3• 15 years ago

For decades we as a species have been deciding to turn food into an industry. This decision has had disastrous consequences, but like CO2 in the atmosphere it can't be reversed overnight.

Cross-pollination can bring genetically modified strains into organic crops, making it hard to keep a crop organic even if you want to.

Run-off from industrial agriculture has damaged water and soil, which will impact whatever is planted, whether organic or not.

Soil depletion has also lead to decreased nutrient presence in fruits and vegetables.

Industrial agriculture has reduced the number of varieties of each species grown. Why does all broccoli look the same? Surely pre-industry, there were numerous varieties of broccoli.

Land is not divided in such a way to make local, small-scale, organic farms practical. Where are you going to put a farm in New York City or Los Angeles?

This is not to say the problem can't be fixed, but we are living in a non-ideal time for food, so there won't be any ideal choices. The only thing you can do is make better choices, and try to turn the direction of food production around so that eventually ideal choices will be possible.

simonsarris• 15 years ago

> Why does all broccoli look the same? Surely pre-industry, there were numerous varieties of broccoli.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here or not. If you are sincere then you are mistaken beyond your wildest dreams. All cultivars of the broccoli species look magnificently different.

Broccoli, kale, collard greens, Chinese broccoli, cauliflower, Romanesco broccoli and broccoflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi are all different cultivars within the same species: Brassica oleracea.

antidaily• 15 years ago

Sustainability and local product seem to be a big movement in the restaurant industry. Problem is, its only high-end or smaller restaurants. So as long as there's a dollar menu at McDonalds, industrial farms and bio-engineered pesticide-ridden fruits and veggies will be prevalent.

trotsky6• 15 years ago

And vegetables and fruits? Well, practically all of the mass produced ones never EVER saw any soil or real sunlight but artificial gel to grow on

Wait, what? You are going off the deep end here. I assure you that the exact opposite is true - practically all mass produced produce touches soil and uses real sunlight. The economics don't support your premise at all. Have you never been to rural areas? I assure you they are not lined with industrial warehouses and artificial lighting systems.

At some level you need to take on a certain amount of responsibility. My locally grown produce mostly comes from people I know. They don't need a ton of regulations and inspections to keep me safe - social contracts do. We've been doing it this way for thousands of years. The regulations and inspections mostly became needed when you got so far removed from your food source. Also life isn't 100.00% safe, c'est la vie.

Tichy2• 15 years ago

"Have you never been to rural areas? I assure you they are not lined with industrial warehouses and artificial lighting systems."

You are aware that Farmville != rural areas in the real world? There are movies and books depicting the industrial rising of cattle (for example "Eating Animals" does a nice, graphics job). You can spot the "pink lakes" which result from the waste output of industrial pig farming on Google Maps. But these are indeed not the areas you would visit on a weekend trip to the countryside, because these areas reek for miles.

Just because some chickens still roam outside, doesn't prove that the majority of them does.

The article about pig farming was on HN years ago, but I can't find it atm. But Google provides a lot of info "factory farming".

kahawe5• 15 years ago

Well, even with local farmers you do not escape the mass food production industry, really. AFAIK there are hardly any farmers left who do NOT grow their vegetables and fruits with actual, natural seeds but rely on those genetically modified super-seeds from Monsanto and other companies. These do not bear usable seeds, you cannot plant them in the next year. Plus they need all sorts of chemicals and pesticides to grow, still.

> We've been doing it this way for thousands of years

And for the bigger part of those thousands of years, on average we barely made it to the age of 30, let alone 40. It is good if you can trust local folk but it is better to have professional inspections because there is a lot that can still go wrong in farming and your local farmers might just miss or not know about something crucial. Or maybe I am just used too much to the German way of things already.... inspections and checks for everything.

grannyg00se• 15 years ago

"burn it or do FSM-knows what with it"

Upvoted for mentioning FSM, in acronym form, and not providing any type of explanation. This implies an expectation that FSM is common enough knowledge at this point. I wonder how many people just skipped over it. Surprisingly, a google search of "fsm" actually brings up the relevant page in the first search result, beating out the wikipedia page for Finite State Machine.

natural219• 15 years ago

I read this as, "with the price of equities in the fish market dropping, which fish are safe to eat, presumably because those companies will be more lax with health codes?"

I was way off.

metaprinter• 15 years ago

Four Fish by Paul Greenberg - tackles this very subject. I recommend it. http://roundvalleyfishing.com/2011/06/15/book-review-four-fi...

senthil_rajasek• 15 years ago

This renders very well on my android phone. Thanks.

Zarkonnen5• 15 years ago

Since mercury levels are obviously something people are very concerned about, I will look into adding them to the information. Does anyone have good sources for mercury levels of different kinds of fish?

trotsky6• 15 years ago

Why are various farmed fish listed as "not okay to eat"? Certainly farmed fish can't be under pressure like wild fish. Is it because of the environmental practices of the farms? I see us farmed raised catfish is listed ok, but apparently asian farmed catfish isn't?

jkjeldgaard• 15 years ago

Mainly due to environmental strain and unethical practices. More info if you click the said fish.

sliverstorm3• 15 years ago

Environmental impact of the farms, and raising practices. You can grow catfish in awful waters and as they are bottom-feeders, basically feed them trash. Allegedly many Chinese catfish farms do just that.

trotsky6• 15 years ago

That makes sense, I just thought the website was only about sustainability of the populations based on some of the wording. I'm afraid to even look into the chinese catfish raising - wasn't there a recent scandal where asian catfish was being mass sold as US farm raised?

chrismealy• 15 years ago

Farmed fish are often fed unsustainable fish! It's just laundering unsustainability.

trotsky6• 15 years ago

wow, really? Are you pulling my leg?

sehugg2• 15 years ago

That's true for carnivorous fish like salmon, but an omnivore like catfish will eat pellets made of grain and produce meat at a 2 to 1 ratio, on par with poultry. It's a matter of the consumer being aware of the difference and being able to trust the labeling (and the implied farming practices).

patja• 15 years ago

Farmed salmon as a good choice? Think you better check that one out, unless it is in an inland pond (rare), farmed salmon is a pretty bad choice. Also having only a single listing for "cod" over-simplifies things. Many diverse fish are marketed as cod, and some of them are quite sustainable. Sablefish aka Black Cod from Alaska is a delicious buttery treat and quite sustainable.

fishyfish• 15 years ago

One odd thing about this list:

There are 6 instances where species are listed as okay to eat if they are from the US while not okay to eat if they are from elsewhere. There are 0 instances where the opposite is true.

# yes Barramundi (US/Europe/Australia) # yes Barramundi (Closed Production) # no Barramundi (Other)

# yes Catfish (US Farmed) # no Catfish (Other)

# yes Crayfish (US) # no Crayfish (Other)

# yes Herring (Norway, Iceland, North Sea, US) # no Herring (Other)

# yes King Crab (US) # no King Crab (Other)

# yes Northern Prawn/Pink Shrimp (US and Canadian) # no Northern Prawn/Pink Shrimp (Other)

There seems to be some bias towards US fisheries in this list.

Zarkonnen5• 15 years ago

Yes, there is, due to a lot of the data being sourced from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, whose data is US-centric. If you look at the detail view of eg crayfish ( http://whichfish.org/detail/crayfish_us.html ), the issue is that the other sources have no data, so I had to use the likely overly US-centric view.

zandor• 15 years ago

Which is a pretty big issue. Local sources matter. For example the King Crabs in the Barents Sea are really invasive and are spreading like wildfire. In Norway they are trying to hinder it's advancement and reducing it's population. Russia however, is currently more protective. After all they introduced them in the first place.

anonymous246• 15 years ago

No, imho it's not bias. For wild fish, the US enforces the quantity of fish that can be taken much more effectively, than, say China/Japan.

Second, the regulations/practices on the environmental impact of fish farms on the nearby sea are probably better in the US than elsewhere (many fish farms are in the backwaters of an ocean).

Do you really find it hard to believe that the USA has higher standards of environmental protection than other countries?

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

A fish doesn't care what country it was caught by. The US limits are surely set with the current population in mind... a population that is directly effected by what other countries are fishing. The more Japanese fish you eat, the less America fishes. It all evens out.

code_duck• 15 years ago

How about everyone just leaves the ocean alone for a while?

Eat jellyfish.

DrStalker• 15 years ago

Any list that opens with

no: All Bottom Trawled Fish no: All Fish caught by Longline

loses me right there. I don't know how different types of fish are caught, and I'm not going to reearch it before making each purchase.

Aloisius• 15 years ago

I don't where you buy your fish, but my fish counter has a fishmonger behind it who is eager to answer questions. Any good fishmonger will know when the fish came in, how the fish was caught and a good number of them will know if they are sustainable.

alexjgough• 15 years ago

Bzzzzz. Sea bass is often really Antarctic toothfish, a species which, while certified as 'sustainable' is anything but. See http://www.lastocean.co.nz for details on a campaign to protect the Ross Sea, one of the World's last almost untouched wild places.

Which Fish: With fish stocks under pressure, which are okay to eat?

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